PHILIP GLASS BREAKS THROUGH

Published: October 25, 1981

(Page 3 of 4)

After Chicago, Glass enrolled at Juilliard and became a model composition student. His classical influences included virtually every independent American composer of the last 50 years. Referring to the contemporary king of American classical composers, he claimed his deepest wish was to be ''Elliott Carter II.'' Away from Juilliard, however, Glass was visiting New York's jazz clubs and involving himself with a nonmusical world which only later would influence his work profoundly. ''Visual artists are more used to innovation than composers,'' Glass has said. ''A new generation comes along every 10 years or so. Temperamentally, the art world suits me better.''

After Juilliard, Glass spent two years on a Ford Foundation grant in Pittsburgh, publishing some 20 pieces in an open, Coplandesque style before finally admitting that he no longer recognized himself in his music. At the age of 27, he accepted a Fulbright Scholarship to start all over again in Paris with Nadia Boulanger -the teacher of Thompson, Carter and a later generation of refugees from serialism.

''She took me back to day one in counterpoint,'' Glass recalls, ''and later in harmony. I began to learn the skills that make music go.'' By sheer chance, he also found a job notating by ear a film score improvised by the Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar, which introduced Glass to a musical tradition ignored by the Juilliard curriculum, a music that he felt could take him outside his own history. On vacation in Morocco, Glass was further struck by North African rhythms and the repetitions of Islamic art. He composed his first work in a new mode for a group of American actors who would later form Mabou Mines - including his companion in Paris, JoAnne Akalaitis, whom he soon married. The score involved 10 20-second phrases based on repeated musical figures for two instruments, each phrase separated by 20 seconds of silence.

Glass and JoAnne Akalaitis After 74 spent four months traveling in the East - visiting the Himalyan foothills and various ashrams in India - before returning to downtown Manhattan in the spring of 1967. Turning his back on a conventional career, Glass supported his work - and soon a daughter, Juliet, and a son, Zachary -over the next decade through a variety of odd jobs: plumber, furniture mover, loft carpenter, cabdriver and assistant to the sculptor Richard Serra. In a lively visual and performing-arts community in SoHo, Glass discovered other composers working in repetitive idioms, and a new generation of sculptors whose stripped-down vocabulary - Minimalism - had important parallels to his own emerging aesthetic. In order to have his music performed at art galleries and lofts, he collected a group of friends, many of them composers as well - among them current ensemble members Jon Gibson and Richard Landry, and later Kurt Munkacsi, Jack Kripl, Richard Peck, Michael Riesman and vocalist Iris Hiskey.

At their first rehearsal in 1968, Glass realized he would have to amplify the keyboards and woodwinds to balance the sound. A few years later, he hired Munkacsi, a sound engineer who had worked with John Lennon and the avant-garde jazz musician Ornette Coleman, to rebuild his homemade system and ''mix'' the sound on stage during performances. With $500 from the Hebrew Free Loan Society, Glass pressed his first album, ''Music With Changing Parts'' on his own record label, Chatham Square. His earliest works, eschewing chord changes altogether, were austere and mesmerizing to some listeners while maddening to others.

''There's an old tradition of the composer as performer,'' Glass says when asked why he took to playing his music publicly on various amplified keyboard instruments. ''Liszt, Berlioz, Paganini. Juilliard encouraged me not to perform, but since I couldn't get foundation support and I refused to teach, I had no other option.''

With appearances at the Whitney Museum in 1969 and the Guggenheim in 1970, the ensemble began to perform regularly, though not without some resistance in music circles. At the Spoleto Music Festival in 1972, someone tried to cut the power supply; in Amsterdam, an audience member leaped on stage to pound on the keyboard. Glass punched him with one hand and kept playing with the other.

But the struggle to produce his own work was beginning to pay off in musical terms: In 1974, Glass began adding chord changes to his repetitive rhythms, discovering moods of Baroque delicacy and Wagnerian grandeur, of deep contemplation and ecstatic celebration. This signaled a return to overtly emotional content not unlike what was occurring in the visual arts, where it was becoming apparent that Minimalism - with its incessant emphasis on reduction and repetition - was no longer enough.

''Einstein'' introduced to a wide audience Glass's new ''Maximalist'' sound. The kudos it received far outweighed the catcalls, but after it closed Glass found himself contemplating his next opera from behind the wheel of a cab. He and Wilson were $90,000 in debt, although later, a four-record ''Einstein'' set -called ''a landmark in the recorded history of recent American music'' by The Times - would sell over 20,000 copies.